Williams and the First Amendment

First of all, we're going quiz-less this Friday, I'm afraid, because other pressures have intervened this Friday morning. The quiz returns next week.

Now. More on Juan Williams. There is a broad misunderstanding in my country of the First Amendment. It does not mean a person can say anything, anywhere. It most certainly does not mean a person can say anything, anywhere and expect to be paid for it. And it definitely does not mean that any time a person is punished for speech, his or her First Amendment rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is a value, and as is the case with any value, other values countervail and push against it, and balance must be found.

First of all, there's the value of editorial judgment. The Guardian or the New York Times or whatever might, say, turn down an opinion column submission from someone. That person might scream (in America) that the NYT suppressed her freedom of speech, especially if what she has to say runs counter to the Times' position. Well, no. The NYT has editors who make continuous judgments about the value of submissions. They have every right to make those judgments.

Then there is, alas, commerce. NPR was paying Juan Williams. It wasn't paying him to do whatever he wanted or say whatever he wanted. It was paying him to do a specific thing. As any NPR listener knows, that thing included not venturing personal opinions, because they're extremely careful about that. Williams is quoted in today's Washington Post:

In an interview Thursday, he said, "As a journalist, it's unsupportable that your employer would fire you for stating your honest opinion, and I daresay your honest feelings, in an appropriate setting."

That's a statement that I'm sure many readers will find compelling on its face, but it is actually a completely preposterous statement. Let's say a BBC reporter (standards and practices similar to NPR's on these matters) went on a left-wing show and said in his view, the white race, or Christianity, was a disease. If political opponents of that view made enough of a stink, he'd be fired, I should think. He could say exactly what Williams says above: he was just expressing his honest feelings. Which shows, I think, how absurd a statement it is. In that same WashPost article, an NPR exec is quoted as saying:

"Juan has a First Amendment right to say whatever he wants. He does not have a First Amendment right to be paid by NPR for saying whatever he wants."

This is absolutely true. Especially in this day and age: Juan Williams can, with very little seed money and in about an hour or two, start a blog, where he can say whatever he wants to say. But NPR has no obligation to pay him to say whatever he wants to say. It's true across media properties. If I someday say something that runs afoul of some Guardian rule of taste or ethics, they'll have every right to terminate me on taste or ethics grounds. Put aside the question that the First Amendment doesn't exist in Britain; there's sill a robust tradition, at this paper in particular, of freedom of speech. But even that tradition by no means ensures that I can say anything I want to say, if that thing, in the editor's judgment, violates a canon of taste or ethics. His call.

No opinionator has the right to be paid to say whatever s/he wants. The Washington Post has every right in the world to say someday to Eugene Robinson or Charles Krauthammer, "We're tired of you. Take it somewhere else." The Post need give no reason, in fact. They're employees, or maybe technically contractors, but in either case, they work at the employer's will, as I do. There would be no First Amendment issue there at all in my eyes.

This isn't really about the First Amendment. If Williams had said something about Jews being greedy, would O'Reilly and Gingrich and Palin have leapt to support him? Of course not. You can't talk that way about Jews. And rightly so of course, and no one would defend it.

But now suppose that Williams had said something about Mexicans being lazy and been released by NPR. Here, I'd bet, depending on the exact wording, the troika mentioned above would have backed Williams. Why? Because the American right sees Latinos as a class that's coddled and protected by the, dare I use the phrase, professional left. They see Muslims that way, too.

There is truth in those claims, I won't deny it. Liberals will look out for blacks, Latinos, Muslims, gays, Jews (on minority-persecution issues, but not on the occupation of course). Conservative will look out for whites, Catholics, southerners, straights, Jews (on "Greater" Israel and the occupation).

But let's not pretend this is about the First Amendment. This is about our ongoing culture war. Inasmuch as it's about Muslims, it is also about our post-9-11 war footing, and the clash of two other social values, security versus pluralism.

All that said, NPR probably should have just quietly not renewed Williams' contract whenever it expired. Now, they face some bother. If the Republicans take over the House, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them go after the network's funding. As a practical matter, that won't be a big deal; very little of NPR's money, in fact, comes from the federal government. They made sure of that before Gingrich took over back in the 90s. All the same, the GOP will make a big deal of it.

But I hate it when people say of these situations, well, whatever the actual truth might be, NPR handled it badly, and that's the bottom line. No. That's not the bottom line. How NPR handled this is a question of political judgment and expediency. The question of principle is whether NPR had the right, under the First Amendment, to do what it did. The obvious answer to that is yes.